Giving your images good filenames and alternative text will help your page show up in image searches as well. This image shows you how to improve your life, use your time better, increase your money and increase your health with a blog!
Okay, so you want to make lots of money but you’re too lazy to do any work for it. Welcome to Blogging! It may take you years, even decades, to make the equivalent of a minimum wage job, yet millions of people continue to treat their blog like the golden goose at the end of the rainbow where there’s a big X in the sand.
As I’ve written before, I am making money with blogging and the riches are totally astounding! I could live in Mexico for a full day and a half on what I make in a typical day of blogging. I’m an expert blogger who has all the same qualifications of all those other expert blogging bloggers: I write a blog!
And because I’m so kind and big-hearted and need something nice to mention when I take the stand next month, I’ve decided to give you some blogging tips right from my own experience. You see, I really just want to help YOU make money. I really do. Really. Stop laughing.
To prove to you that I actually want to help you I’ve decided to take time out of my busy, busy daytime television watching schedule to give you five tips on how to increase traffic and revenue to your blog. I suggest you memorize these tips or, at the very least, get them tattooed on your leg upside down so you can look down and read them any time you want for the rest of your life.
Rule #1 – Be wordy: Why use three simple words like “write more words” when you can take a simple concept and fill it full of keywords that might help your post end up in a random search just like a lawyer might use if he was researching mesothelioma, Viagra or Vioxx. I’m always amazed at what sort of keywords people use to get to my site. I actually blogged about all the weird things that bring people here when I wrote about some of the strange things that people are searching for on the internet. In addition to writing more, you need to also break those words up over multiple posts. Search engines love sites with more posts over sites with fewer posts. The more posts you have, the more your writing will show up in search results. Really. Really really.
Rule #2 – Link To Yourself: As your blog grows you’ll want to begin referencing back to older articles and things you’ve written in the past. This will drive readers deeper into your site and will essentially create a “web” of information or text for visitors to get “caught up” in. I’m not talking about “trapping” people with a ton of links, all going to your own site, but valid references with good link words are always a good idea. See the link in Rule #1 as a legitimate example of this. Some search engines will now pick up “strange things that people are searching for on the internet” and associate it with the page I linked to. If I had five posts, all linking to that same page with similar text, then that page may raise in a list of “strange things people search for” on some search engines listings.
Rule #3 – Your Domain Name Matters: This is especially true when you’re just starting out. Let’s say I’m a butcher and I have a blog all about selling meat. I choose the domain name “HamMerchant.com” because it sounds kind of cute. I guarantee that you’re going to get a fairly large percentage of people searching the internet for the word “hammer” or for the word “chant.” And no matter how much you write about pork butt and bull tongues, you’re going to get people who stumble across your site looking for a better way to bang in nails or a better way to sing like a monk. When you choose a domain name try to be specific and try to use words that describe your content to some degree. Other examples can be found in words that have multiple meanings. Is “Greenbank.com” about gardening on a river or about a financial institution that has money? Is “staffbuilder.com” about making walking sticks or hiring the right people? As your site grows you domain name will matter less (Amazon.com is now about a river and BoingBoing.net does not sell springs) but initially you might need every bit of help you can get.
Rule #4 – Comment On Other Blogs: I don’t do a very good job with this at all. I lately haven’t been able to find the time to write and comment on my own blogs due to a number of lifestyle changes. But I’m getting back in the swing of things and beginning to not only get back to a regular writing schedule, but also a regular reading and commenting schedule. When you leave a comment you link back to your own site, but your also all legitimacy and have a chance to write something somewhat intelligent in a forum other than your own blog. Don’t just leave stupid comments like “Hi, I like your site, please visit mine!” if you want to be considered anymore than just some random spammer. Try to leave intelligent and appropriate comments. Most blogger comments are moderated by a real person these days, so don’t expect to be able to get away with comment spamming.
Rule #5 – Donate Your Words: There are lots and lots and lots and lots of sites that specialize in giving away content to other blogs for free. Think about Ezine Articles and ArticleCity and the like. Sure, using someone else’s content that can be found in 100 different places won’t turn your blog into an overnight success, but having someone else use your content (especially if they keep the plug back to you) will really increase your traffic. I usually try to do this when I’m starting a blog and I find it generates a fair amount of interest and traffic pretty quickly for a short period. I’ve also found that you have to continually submit things to really keep that traffic going. Occasionally I’ll see a spike in traffic for a week or so because some blog somewhere picked up one of my old “donated” articles. Here’s the cool part: you can still publish your post first and then submit it later. So there’s no reason why you can’t go trolling through some of your old posts that you’ve long forgotten and submit them.
You may have guessed the blogging truism by now that runs through most of these: Search Engines are Stupid. I don’t care how much you love Google and how much you worship the ground their engineers walk on, it’s still a search engine and it still makes a lot of mistakes. If I search engine wasn’t stupid it would only give you the three or four pages that actually contain the information you’re looking for, instead of 10,000,000 pages that might contain the information you’re looking for. I rarely find exactly what I need on the very first listed item of Google. Do I often find it in the first few pages? Yes, but that requires human interaction to sift through the crap that Google (or any other search engine) produces. So the full truism is this:
Search Engines are Stupid, Humans are Smarter. This means that you can’t just seed your blog with nonsense and keywords and hope to make a million bucks. Once you get someone’s attention with a stupid search engine, you have to keep them reading and at your site with your smart writing. You have to offer something useful or something of value to the reader, or the reader will leave.
And the one traffic increasing trick? Images! When I include silly clip art images in my revenue generating blog posts (as many, many people do) I make sure to give them filenames, alternative text and even captions that all have to do with what I’m writing about. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone off looking for something and found my own images popping up.
You’re welcome.
